Process – Establish Branding & Layout
The challenge here was to refresh our current brand without straying too far from our current identity, including our current logo and dominant brand color.
Objectives
Illustrate the Story
Compliment Liz's skillful messaging and approachable brand voice with a well crafted design system and professional photography
- Mission stock photography: Find crisp, clean nautically themes photography with sharp contrast to compliment the design system.
- Create a design system that successfully intertwines what we do with who we are while driving home our core elements of sailing and the nautical world.
- Create and build design assets that are used across the site unifying our theme/brand. Iconography, patterns, elements, digital waves, hairlines.
- Research and establish typography. Make sure fonts are compatible and have weight variety to emphasize hierarchy.
- Design mobile priority. Use a grid/columns
Why Webflow? Speed & Efficiency = Profitability
Webflow is a SaaS(Software as a service) application that allows designers to build responsive websites with browser based visual editing software. While designers use the tool, Webflow automatically generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Features
- No code development
- Think it design it. Not limited to theme features and layouts like in other visual editors.
- Interface directly corresponds to real world web standards. All visually editable design properties output semantic html and css. No code bloat.
- Animation, transitions, even interactive video is made simple.
- One click hosting set up, no database setup, no plugin installations
- Amazon S3 dedicated adaptable hosting fully secured and really fast.
- Can easily build fully customizable Content Management Systems.
- Mobile optimization and responsive design is super intuitive.
- Client content editing is simple.
- Standard SEO features.
My toolbox & platform experience
I've been in the design, development, and production industry since 2003. My experience ranges from Technical(HTML, CSS, Javascript, SEO) to Creative(Branding, Photography, Motion, Video Production, 3d modeling/animation, and Graphic Design.
Project Design Tools
- Photoshop: Photography edits, effects, color correction, and compositing.
- Illustrator: Logo design and construction, iconography, and design elements.
- Adobe XD & Sketch: User Interface & Web Design
Other Platform Experience
- Wordpress including theme development 15+ years
- SquareSpace
- Shopify
- Wix
- Open Cart
- Woo Commerce
- Hubspot
SEO - Brief Overview
My experience in SEO has taught me that there are no free lunches when it comes to ranking high. It takes time, dedication, and straight up work.
SEO Techniques
- Keyword research - What are your customers searching for and how many?
- Competive Analysis - Who's ranking for the keywords that you want to rank for and why?
- On-page optimization - title, header tags, meta tag, links, keywords, etc. Proper structure and hierarchy
- Consistent content creation with keyword optimization
- Social media presence - Are we creating valuable content and is it being shared.
- Backlinks - Who and how many people(social media)/websites are pointing back to our website?
